Why I Felt Like I Was Crashing After Every Meal (Even When My Blood Sugar Was Normal)
For a long time, I could not understand why I felt like I was crashing after almost every meal. I would eat something totally normal and then twenty or thirty minutes later my whole body would shift into what felt like a sudden drop. My stomach would feel empty and heavy at the same time, my legs would turn jittery, my chest would buzz, and a wave of lightheadedness would move through me like I was about to faint. Sometimes my brain felt unreal or distant, almost like a soft dissociation. Other times I felt a rush of adrenaline that made absolutely no sense. The sensation was so specific. It felt exactly like low blood sugar, except every time I checked, the numbers were normal. That mismatch was terrifying. How could I feel like something was collapsing inside me when my glucose meter insisted everything was fine.
What I did not know then is that this pattern is far more common than people realize, and it is not simple anxiety and it is not traditional hypoglycemia. For many people, including me, the body is experiencing a nervous system reaction, not a metabolic failure. The brainstem and vagus nerve can become so sensitive that even a normal post-meal glucose shift feels like danger. When that happens, the body sends out a rush of adrenaline, which creates the shaking, the stomach dropping, the dizziness, the buzzing, the sense of falling, and the panicked feeling that does not feel emotional at all. It feels chemical and involuntary because it is.
My story actually began long before the symptoms became obvious. I had a significant viral history, including Epstein Barr, and that created a long period of depersonalization, depression, and nervous system fragility. When I later tried a healing protocol that involved drinking celery juice on an empty stomach every morning, something shifted. I did not change my diet otherwise. I only added the juice. The morning glucose spike and drop were too much for my already sensitive system. That is when the post-meal episodes began. I started feeling hollow, shaky, buzzy, lightheaded, and on the verge of a crash even though my blood sugar remained in a normal range.
Trying to help myself, I eventually went low carb, and that is when everything worsened. My body could not handle the removal of carbohydrates. The low carb diet seemed to stress my energy system even further, and I eventually developed post exertional malaise. Even gentle movement became unpredictable. My body would crash from things that used to feel easy. The combination of a fragile nervous system, a history of viral illness, the juicing pattern, and then the low carb phase created a state where my body became highly reactive to any shift in fuel, digestion, or exertion.
What I experience now, and what many people with similar stories experience, is not traditional hypoglycemia. It is a nervous system injury that affects the way the body interprets internal signals. The brain misreads normal fluctuations as emergencies. The stomach sends alarms. The vagus nerve becomes jumpy. The sympathetic system reacts too quickly. The sensations are real, but the cause is not a true drop in blood sugar. It is an overprotective system trying to keep you safe.
If this feels familiar to you, you are not alone. Many people live in this confusing middle space where symptoms are intense and scary but lab results look normal. This entire website exists because I needed a place that understood this pattern and could speak to it gently, clearly, and without judgment. I wanted a space that combined lived experience with nervous system science so people like us could finally make sense of our bodies.
If you are here, you belong here. What you feel is real. And there is a way forward.